


what's going on?

by v3ilfire



Series: champagne pouring over us [3]
Category: Saints Row
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 01:46:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12288618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/v3ilfire/pseuds/v3ilfire
Summary: The irony of being grilled about her feelings for Johnny Gat on the same day that she learns that she is one life-threatening emergency from kissing him at all times is not lost on Lucia Valdez, but she'll never admit that.





	what's going on?

**Author's Note:**

> welcome back to the garbage dome where i sit on my garbage throne

Almost overnight, the scrappy street gang that Lucia had rebuilt from the ground up went from a stain on Stilwater’s reputation to one of its most famous underdog stories. It was amazing in the sense that suddenly everyone wanted to give her free food and shiny shit and really fucking exhausting in the sense that it was _really fucking exhausting_.

Pierce kept the music in the car low enough that she could hear him half-humming half-singing along while her head vibrated against the window. They had another half-hour of sitting in traffic between some bullshit interview and a bullshit photoshoot, which was only too long in the sense that she knew there was a whole table of craft services waiting for her and half an hour was more than enough time for Johnny to fucking destroy it before she ever got there.

“You still alive over there?”

Lucia cracked open an eye and grunted something that sounded halfway between English and Spanish, then hunkered deeper into the seat with her arms and legs crossed tight.

“How’d you think that went?” She could hear him scratching at his goatee. “I’m trying to work myself in as the mogul. Everyone else has a bit, you know? You’re the Boss, Johnny’s the badass, Shaundi’s the hot one. I really think I got something going with _mogul_. Like a manager, but still part of the action.”   
Lucia snorted. “You really gotta workshop your pickup lines. There ain’t one drunk bitch at a bar who’s gonna stick around past _work myself in_.”   
“Who says that’s who I’m after?”  
“‘Cause there ain’t no sober bitch _outside_ a bar who’s gonna stick around past _hi, I’m Pierce._ ”  
“Dick.” Lucia half-shrugged with her left shoulder to avoid moving from what was the perfect car-nap position. “What’s _your_ line?” 

Without opening her eyes, Lucia wriggled one of her arms free to do a slow, theatrical sweep over the body that was literally on the cover of every Image as Designed catalog. Pierce snorted, and then went right back to humming along with the radio.

Lucia had _just_ fallen asleep when the next commercial break hit. “Can I ask you something? Like, fuckin _real talk_ ask you something.”   
“Shoot,” she muttered.  
“What the fuck is up with you and Gat?”  
“Uh, nothing?”  
“Bullshit.” 

Lucia broke from her nap to try and stare Pierce down, but he was just outside her line of sight and definitely out of her designated comfort spot, so she just closed it again and hoped he’d drop it. Apparently feeling pretty fucking brazen, he didn’t.

“I swear to god it’s like high school all over again watching you two make dumb googly eyes at each other.”  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”   
“ _Bullshit_ ,” he said again. Lucia suddenly felt a little carsick. “Come on, Boss. You’re best friends, every party we throw you sneak off to smoke on the roof, you’re the only ones who can stand to watch each other eat…”

Without saying another word, Lucia reached over and cranked the radio up.

_We can bounce like my checks did back in the day,  
_ _Before I got this paper, before I got paid._

 

* * *

 

“Holy shit.”

Shaundi froze with a cracker fucking _smothered_ in black caviar halfway to her mouth when Lucia was finally allowed into the studio. The wardrobe people had sealed her into a long, sheer gown that was more crystal than fabric, and while she enjoyed being a glittering tower and rolling in the attention, she was fucking _starving_. There were already three shrimp on a tiny plate before she could think to answer.   
“Are you already done or something?” 

Shaundi had pulled up a chair right next to the table, wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants while still in full hair and makeup, which is about as close to God as anyone could get.  
“Yeah. They’re doing Johnny now.” 

Lucia broke her laser-focus from the cheese tray to look around the room for the first time. The studio was pretty quiet even though there were two photographers and at least ten twenty-something interns and assistants buzzing around in the dark. The only source of light was the fancy fucking multi-point rig up at the front of the room, shining on one of those all-white magazine spread living room sets set against a dark gray screen.

And sitting on the loveseat, to _everyone’s_ surprise, sat one shockingly behaved Johnny Gat doing that weird squinty-angry model face that was always on every cover.

“What sort of fucking horse tranquilizer did they put in this?” Lucia said, breaking her gaze to eye the table as she continued to eat from it (and definitely _not_ to ignore the fact that she was feeling a little warm under the collar because that would be _fucking ridiculous_ even though he did look really really good in that violet-ass suit).   
“The _this caviar is still out of our price range_ kind, probably. How pissed do you think they’d be if I put it on some Freckle Bitch’s?”   
“You’re reading my fucking _mind_ right now.”  

Well, she probably wasn’t, because her mind pulled her attention back up to the set. Johnny was staring somewhere off to the right, tapping his foot like he did when he was uneasy in the _someone’s about to shoot me_ way. Even if she wasn’t sure that having a gun pointed at him would have gotten him to sit still for a photograph _anyway_ , it would be a bold move for the photographers who looked like they could be knocked over by a stiff breeze. As she glanced about for an intern casually pointing a machine gun, she blindly reached down for one more shrimp, but missed. Her manicured nail glanced against something strangely smooth instead.

Lying half-concealed by a folded napkin lay a pair of glasses. Lucia stared at them for a moment, just long enough to throw one last caviar cracker down the hatch, and then decided that the only way to figure out if they were what she thought they were was to try them on. _Try_ was the key word there considering that even half a fucking foot from her nose, the damn things warped the entire room into a bubble and threatened to give her a headache thirty seconds in.

And then, with Johnny Gat’s glasses clutched to her chest, Lucia started laughing so hard that Shaundi nearly jumped out of her chair.

“Jesus, Boss, I’m starting to think they actually put some shit in this food.” Before the laughter finally turned into wheezing, the photographers called a break, either done or just unsure how to react to a known murderer breaking into an unprovoked fit at the back of their studio. 

Eventually, Lucia got her wits about her again and pulled herself to her full height, careful to dab the tears from her eyes and not wipe her eyeliner clean off. The interns were scurrying all around them, making sure to give the still half-chuckling Boss of the Saints a wide berth even as she rounded the now ravaged craft services table to get the glasses back to their rightful owner.

(She tried so very, very hard not to stop dead in her tracks when she noticed Johnny staring straight at her even though he probably couldn’t see much more than a shimmering column in the dark.)

With her brain now completely non-functioning and only her gut to rely on, Lucia made a beeline for the set and slid one knee onto the loveseat to angle Johnny’s glasses right onto his face.

“Thanks Boss,” he said, a hand brushing up against her thigh as he went to adjust them. Lucia couldn’t just flop down to his level, but she did her best to ease herself into as casual a position she could with one leg tucked underneath her and the other on the ground. “Where’s Pierce?”  
“Off mogul-ing, or whatever.”   
“ _What?_ ”   
She leaned an elbow on the back of the couch with a shrug. “Dunno. Ask him. It’s his ‘thing’ now. ‘Cause I’m the Boss, you’re the badass, Shaundi’s the hot one…”  
“Hey, fuck off. I’m the hot one.”

Lucia snorted. She was just about to ask him if he wanted to bail on this whole thing and just go get stoned and eat, but suddenly a bright flash went off to their left. It caught both of them off-guard and reaching for guns they didn’t have, but stranger than anything else, Johnny had thrown one hand over her waist like he was ready to throw her behind himself.

They turned to look at each other and the world suddenly became _such_ a rush that Lucia couldn’t hear one of the photographers apologizing or yelling at an intern or _whatever_. Both of them were just full of adrenaline and not sure what to do about his hand still on her hip or her iron grip on the back of the couch or who broke first and started laughing, but eventually it came down to the fact that they were falling all over each other trying to stop long enough to breathe and not being able to.

It was only when they eventually calmed down that Lucia looked up to catch Pierce staring at her from across the room and had to remind herself that he had no way of knowing that her first impulse had not been to laugh along with Johnny, but to kiss him.


End file.
